$1.7 million added to S.F. campaign to eradicate AIDS, HIV

1of 4Johanna, an African American transgender woman, speaks during a press conference to announce additional funds toward the "get to zero" HIV/AIDS initiative at City Hall in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015.Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

2of 4Dr. Diane Havlir speaks during a press conference to announce additional funds toward the "get to zero" HIV/AIDS initiative at City Hall in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015.Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

3of 4James Loduca, San Francisco AIDS Foundation vice president, pauses while speaking at a news conference to announce additional funds toward the "get to zero" HIV/AIDS initiative at City Hall in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015.Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

4of 4Dr. Susan Buchbinder speaks during a press conference to announce additional funds toward the "get to zero" HIV/AIDS initiative at City Hall in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015.Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

San Francisco will dedicate $1.7 million in new funding to support the city’s Getting to Zero program, an ongoing initiative aimed at making the city the first in the country to be free of AIDS and HIV infections.

Mayor Ed Lee said Thursday that the city will contribute $1.2 million to the effort, with money going specifically to target people who are hardest to reach. An additional $500,000 will be donated by the MAC AIDS Fund, the cosmetics company’s longtime HIV/AIDS charity.

“We want to have no new infections, we want to have no preventable deaths and we certainly want to have no stigma,” said Lee, citing the central goals of the Getting to Zero campaign, created to cut HIV transmissions and HIV-related deaths by 90 percent by 2020.

“We can, in our lifetime, end this epidemic for everyone,” he said.

To reach that goal, the city has already committed $54 million to HIV/AIDS prevention and care for San Francisco residents in this fiscal year. The funds announced Thursday will support staff members hired to reach out to people who have contracted the virus or who are at high risk and may be reluctant to seek medical and mental health services.

San Francisco’s Getting to Zero initiative, which started last year, focuses on expanding access to the HIV-prevention drug regimen known as PrEP, which stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis; getting more people into the city’s treatment program, which connects people to services on the same day they’re diagnosed; and making sure they stay in care.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in San Francisco, but it’s not over,” Dr. Diane Havlir, chief of the UCSF Division of HIV/AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital, said at City Hall on Thursday during an event announcing the new funds.

The rate of new infections in San Francisco has dropped dramatically over the past two decades. Last year, the city marked a record low number of HIV diagnoses. The 302 new cases contrasted starkly with the 2,332 recorded at the peak of the epidemic in 1992.

But more work needs to be done to engage people who are hard to reach, particularly African American gay men, who have the highest rates of new diagnoses, as well as young people, intravenous drug users and women, including transgender women.

Johanna Brown, a transgender woman who was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 and AIDS in 1995, spoke of the importance of connecting with the right health providers, counselors and peers.

Brown was living in Concord when she underwent her gender transition in 2009, and said she had difficulty finding health providers who understood her hormone medications and other needs until she moved to San Francisco after losing her job and home. In San Francisco, she found doctors who understood her care needs and connected with people in the transgender community.

She has since found a job as a vocational nurse, and her viral loads are undetectable, Brown said. “You start wanting to take care of yourself. You start wanting to live a better life,” she said.

Officials said the MAC AIDS Fund will also donate $100,000 to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, one of the largest and oldest AIDS nonprofits in the country. All proceeds from the sale of MAC’s Viva Glam line of lip products go to support the MAC AIDS Fund, started in 1994.

“What we say at MAC is, if you can sell a lipstick, you can save a life,” said Karen Buglisi, global brand president for MAC. “We want to save a lot of lives.”

Victoria Colliver has been writing about health for the San Francisco Chronicle since 2001, focusing on the health care industry, health policy and cancer. Before joining The Chronicle, she worked for the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune and the Stockton Record.

A graduate of UC Davis, Colliver received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.